Chapter 2 - Conduct Discourse, Slave Narratives, and Black Male Self-Fashioning on the Eve of the Civil War

Summary

In this chapter, Erica Ball focuses on how male-authored slave narratives of the 1850s might be reconsidered as part of a wider conduct discourse depicting what it meant to live “an antislavery life,” itself a form of activism against the slavery system. Taken up by, and often presented to, African Americans as examples of masculine self-transformation, narratives authored by Samuel Ringgold Ward, Solomon Northup, Jermain W. Loguen, and Frederick Douglass taught readers that “dedication to education, morality, and the Protestant work ethic were essential for becoming self-made men.” At the same time, they also reinforced the very same anxieties and ideals articulated in free Black middle-class conduct literature. Ball reenvisions the complex cultural and political work of masculine self-making undertaken by antebellum Black autobiography as exceeding the slave narrative. The result challenges our reading of the slave narrative as emerging within abolitionist politics and focused on proving the violences of (largely southern) slavery and the authority of Black writers who had experienced them. Rather, such narratives testified to an “emerging Black middle-class identity and political culture” that also contested a racial capitalist logic of accounting for Black citizenship.